Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 20
The ladies put up their parasols and turned into the side path. After going down
several turnings, and going through a little gate, Darya Alexandrovna saw standing
on rising ground before her a large pretentious-looking red building, almost finished.
The iron roof, which was not yet painted, shone with dazzling brightness in
the sunshine. Beside the finished building another had been begun, surrounded by
scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds, were laying bricks, pouring
mortar out of vats, and smoothing it with trowels.
“How quickly work gets done with you!” said Sviazhsky. “When I was here last
time the roof was not on.”
“By the autumn it will all be ready. Inside almost everything is done,” said Anna.
“And what’s this new building?”
“That’s the house for the doctor and the dispensary,” answered Vronsky, seeing the
architect in a short jacket coming towards him; and excusing himself to the ladies,
he went to meet him.
Going round a hole where the workmen were slaking lime, he stood still with the
architect and began talking rather warmly.
“The front is still too low,” he said to Anna, who had asked what was the matter.
“I said the foundation ought to be raised,” said Anna.
“Yes, of course it would have been much better, Anna Arkadyevna,” said the architect,
“but now it’s too late.”
“Yes, I take a great interest in it,” Anna answered Sviazhsky, who was expressing
his surprise at her knowledge of architecture. “This new building ought to have
been in harmony with the hospital. It was an afterthought, and was begun without
a plan.”
Vronsky, having finished his talk with the architect, joined the ladies, and led them
inside the hospital.
Although they were still at work on the cornices outside and were painting on the
ground floor, upstairs almost all the rooms were finished. Going up the broad castiron
staircase to the landing, they walked into the first large room. The walls were
stuccoed to look like marble, the huge plate-glass windows were already in, only the
parquet floor was not yet finished, and the carpenters, who were planing a block of
it, left their work, taking off the bands that fastened their hair, to greet the gentry.
“This is the reception room,” said Vronsky. “Here there will be a desk, tables, and
benches, and nothing more.”
“This way; let us go in here. Don’t go near the window,” said Anna, trying the
paint to see if it were dry. “Alexey, the paint’s dry already,” she added.
From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky showed them
the mechanism for ventilation on a novel system. Then he showed them marble
baths, and beds with extraordinary springs. Then he showed them the wards one
after another, the storeroom, the linen room, then the heating stove of a new pattern,
then the trolleys, which would make no noise as they carried everything needed
along the corridors, and many other things. Sviazhsky, as a connoisseur in the latest
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